Demystifying American exceptionalism and aspiration
Fly Me to the Moon flirts with the conspiracy theory that NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 might have been faked on a government soundstage under the direction of Stanley Kubrick, reworking for white American squares his acid-trip hit 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Director Greg Berlanti and screenwriter Rose Gilroy go on from there to trivialize the idea of heterosexual romance in their NASA-set backstory of advertising careerist Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), who devises the national hoodwink by manipulating Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), NASA’s launch director. Davis is stymied by the Apollo I disaster two years earlier and is desperate to boost the U.S. space race against Russia.
Kelly and Cole’s meet-cute is based in so much defeatist, anti-American cynicism that the love story looks as maladroit as the parallel studio-moon slapstick. The fake period romance and phony myth-busting resemble 2010’s Down with Love, which parodied a mid-20th-century Doris Day–Rock Hudson rom-com, now using less style and no conviction.
Fly Me to the Moon’s inept attempt at feel-good escapism proves that demoralized Hollywood is going through a crisis that’s not just political but artistic, too. Originally set for streaming release, Fly Me to the Moon has a cheap TV quality (although it cost $100 million, the same as Costner’s TV-ish Western Horizon). The long setup of roguish political bureaucracy, shifting from dramatic to antic, seems uncertain: Government operative Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson) recruits Kelly to promote NASA, but not enough is made of government sneakiness — the swamp-vs.-patriots challenge and the media distrust we’re currently going through.
Berlanti and Gilroy seem clueless to present government duplicity (Kelly’s secret moon stunt is code-named “Operation Artemis”) as comic relief. This includes Jim Rash’s flighty Lance Vespertine, “the Kubrick of commercials”; a thriller subplot with a wayward cat that avoids examining the deep state; then the piling on of the trite romanticizing of broken people. Kelly, a Mad Men caricature, sells Apollo astronauts as if they’re breakfast cereal, but her deception is more cynical than anything in The Right Stuff, minus Philip Kaufman’s post–Tom Wolfe hipness. (There’s even a brief digression disparaging Southern Christian fundamentalism.)
One of the pleasures of Kaufman’s The Right Stuff was its surprising teetering between satirical machismo and awe for the courage and sacrifice of America’s Mercury space mission. (The adventurous men were as fascinating as the daunting women on the home front.) Johansson and Tatum are pretty, but their characters are vacant. Neither Berlanti nor Gilroy believe in them beyond the fatuous setup of their competitiveness with each other. American aspiration seems beyond the filmmakers’ imaginations.
Berlanti’s best previous film was the funny, poignant, AIDS-era movie The Broken Hearts Club, and his worst was the pandering gay-grooming comedy Love, Simon. His heart and instincts don’t seem to be in Fly Me to the Moon. Maybe he needed to take another look at the virility and muliebrity dynamics of The Right Stuff to understand the rapport that Johansson and Tatum do not bring to this project.
Behind the Kelly and Cole façades, one wonders if activist-actress Johansson (who gives the film its only genuineness) is in it for the fun, the money, or the warped message. Without a believable combination-love-and-culture story, Fly Me to the Moon squanders its titular Sinatra evocation in favor of a lame attempt at a Wag the Dog–style media/government exposé. It’s pointless in the age of AI mania that teaches us to distrust authenticity in behavior, feelings, and national endeavor.
When filmmakers are untrustworthy, a sarcastic rom-com like Fly Me to the Moon can’t be fun. To joke about faking the moon landing while faking romance is a twisted attempt at keeping us gullible and unwary. Fly Me to the Moon is for Millennial viewers far detached from America First patriotism.
